Page 54 of Junk Magic

I stayed outside for a while, despite it being approximately the temperature of hell, to help cook some veggies for a pasta salad that someone was making. I didn’t think that the Were with the scar, whose name was Danny, needed the help, as he seemed pretty handy around a grill. But I wanted to give Sophie some time to get Kimmie to bed.

Apparently, duplication was tiring, not to mention remembered trauma.

“Sooooo, what’s the deal with them?” Danny asked, nodding after the girls.

I flipped over some zucchini, to give it those nice diamond shaped grill marks. And wondered how to explain mage politics to a guy who probably knew nothing about them. It was almost as hard as explaining the Were world to an outsider, and I’d never had much luck with that.

“They’re the human equivalent of vargulfs,” I finally said, and saw his eyebrows rise.

“Didn’t think humans had those.”

“Every society has outcasts,” I said, before I thought. But he only nodded thoughtfully.

“Suppose so. But I heard they lock them up, not throw them out. And try to reintegrate them?”

“Sometimes.” I decided not to mention the success rate on that.

“Then they do better by them than the council does by us.”

“Sebastian is working on that,” I said, looking up from basting some squash.

Only to meet cynical dark eyes that suddenly looked a lot older than his years. “Yeah. Good luck to him.”

“It’s hard to undo hundreds of years of mistakes,” I pointed out. Because Sebastian really was trying. But he had about a thousand other things competing for his time, and the council was completely intransigent on the subject of vargulfs.

“Mistakes?” A dark eyebrow raised. “Unusual word choice for a clan wolf.”

“Yeah, well, I never was my clan’s favorite daughter.”

“So I heard. Guess they don’t like the company you’re keeping.”

“Naw. I was on the outs way before that.”

He laughed suddenly, and it changed his whole face. “You’re not what I expected.”

“And what did you expect?”

He flipped over some onions. “Dunno. But Lobizon and Arnou? That’s high tier stuff. Not the kind of woman I’d expect to be slumming with a bunch of vargulfs.”

“There’s nothing wrong with vargulfs—”

“Tell that to King Sebastian.”

“I have!” It was a little sharper than normal, because Sebastian wasn’t a king and Danny knew it.

“Then tell him again, because nothing is happening. Except that a bunch of Weres feel empowered to attack a kid in the middle of the Corps’ HQ, and nobody did anything about it . . . except for you.”

I frowned. “Sebastian can’t fight every battle at the same time. Not and win. He’s prioritizing the war right now because he has to, but afterward—”

“Afterward may be too late. A shake up like this is the best time to transform a society, when some catastrophe has already cracked its foundations and people are open to change. But the social lines will solidify again soon enough; that’s just how people are. And who knows when we’ll have another chance.”

I frowned some more, because that had sounded a little too practiced to be the first time he’d made that speech. I wondered what the guys were talking about among themselves, when Cyrus wasn’t around to hear. And then I wondered if they didn’t have a point.

Because this war had to mean something. Too many people had died for everything to just go back to the status quo. Especially when the status quo sucked.

But to my surprise, Danny didn’t push it any further. He seemed pretty Zen overall, which was what I needed right then. Politics could wait until I wasn’t as high as a kite.

We slowly baked together under the hot sun, while slathering olive oil onto more zucchini, squash, red peppers and onions. They started to be seriously fragrant, and I realized that I hadn’t eaten since . . . I wasn’t sure. I stole a zucchini slice.

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